How Wendell Restoration Orlando Was Born in Orlando
We didn’t pick Orlando on a map. Orlando picked us. Years ago, one of us got a phone call from a homeowner in College Park whose kitchen ceiling had come down after a slow pipe leak in the wall. She’d already paid another company thousands of dollars for a “dry out” that never actually dried anything. The baseboards were still swollen. The drywall was still soft. And the company had stopped answering her calls. When the crew arrived, what we found was worse than she described: hidden moisture trapped behind the cabinets, mold starting to bloom behind the backsplash, and a family living with dehumidifiers that hadn’t been properly set up in the first place. The work was fixable. What wasn’t fixable was how the whole experience had made her feel: overcharged, abandoned, and afraid to trust anyone else with her home.
That job stayed with us. It wasn’t just that the previous company did it wrong. It was that nobody had explained anything to her. No written scope. No photos. No straight answer about what was actually wrong. She was expected to write checks and hope for the best. We knew Orlando deserved better than hope. The city was growing fast, families were moving into older homes with aging plumbing and flat roofs that had seen too many hurricane seasons, and the demand for honest restoration work was outpacing the supply of people willing to do it right. So we built this branch around a simple idea: show the customer everything. The price before the work starts. The photos as the work happens. The invoice when it’s done. No mysteries, no surprises, no ghosting. That College Park kitchen became the standard for every job we’ve taken since, and it’s why this branch exists today.
Blake Sorensen’s Personal Connection to the Damage Restoration Trade
Blake Sorensen came into this trade through the side door. Before restoration, he worked in construction and saw what happened after the framing crew left and before the finish crew arrived: the water event, the fire event, the storm that turned a finished room back into a shell. Most builders treated that moment as a delay. Blake saw it as the most important part of the whole job. Get the dry-out wrong, and everything built on top of it fails. Get it right, and the home is actually stronger than it was before. That truth got under his skin.
He spent more than a decade learning what water does inside a wall cavity, how smoke penetrates porous surfaces, how quickly mold colonizes a damp subfloor in Florida’s humidity. He learned it the hard way: crawling into crawlspaces in August, pulling saturated carpet in houses where the AC had died days earlier, cutting open drywall that looked fine on the outside and finding the wall cavity dripping inside. The smell of a genuinely wet wall is something you never forget. It’s sweet and sour at the same time, and once you’ve smelled it, you can find hidden moisture in five minutes that a camera on a tripod would miss. Blake trusts his nose and his hands as much as his moisture meter. That’s not something you get from a training manual.
What keeps him in this work isn’t the equipment or the technique. It’s the look on a homeowner’s face when they realize someone is finally telling them the truth about what happened, what it costs, and how long it’ll take. He’s seen too many people reduced to tears by the wrong kind of restoration company: the kind that sees a flooded living room as an invoice instead of a family in crisis. If Blake weren’t doing restoration, he’d still be fixing things. He’s the kind of person who can’t walk past a loose door hinge without tightening it. But restoration is where he belongs, because it’s the only trade where the fix matters as much emotionally as it does structurally. You’re not just repairing a house. You’re giving someone their home back.
Meet Blake Sorensen – The Person Behind Every Job
Blake Sorensen is the Owner and Founder of Wendell Restoration Orlando. He’s a working owner, the kind who still shows up to walk a job before the first piece of equipment rolls in. His background is in residential construction and property restoration, with years of field experience in water mitigation, structural drying, and rebuild coordination across Central Florida. He holds the state licensing required for this work and carries insurance on every job, every time.
What separates Blake from a technician who flies in for a corporate franchise is simple: he lives here. The houses in Conway, Azalea Park, and Winter Park aren’t service addresses to him. They’re neighborhoods he drives through on a regular Tuesday. He knows which streets flood first in a summer downpour and which 1960s slab homes hide cast-iron pipes that are past their expiration date. That local knowledge doesn’t come from a training session. It comes from being here.
Outside of work, Blake is a tinkerer. He restores old furniture, the kind of pieces most people would throw away, and he brings the same patience to a water-damaged home that he brings to a chair with a broken stretcher: figure out what’s actually wrong, fix that first, and don’t pretend it’s anything other than what it is. His commitment to every customer is direct: he will not sell you work you don’t need, and he will not leave a job until the moisture readings say it’s dry.
Our Promise to Orlando Homeowners
We work to one standard: The Relay Standard. It’s not a slogan. It’s five rules we agreed to when we opened this branch under the Wendell name.
- Book in a tap, no phone tag. You shouldn’t have to chase a restoration company. Request help from your phone and get confirmation.
- Give a live arrival time, not a four-hour window. You’ll know when we’re coming, and you can track it.
- Send photos of the work, before and after. If you can’t be home, you’ll still see exactly what was done. Our crews run XPOWER air movers and Injectidry systems when the job calls for it, and we document the process.
- Put the price in writing before we start. No surprises, no add-ons that appear out of nowhere.
- Text a digital invoice you can pay from the link. You get the paperwork the same way you get everything else: on your phone.
Every job is covered by The Relay Visibility Guarantee. That’s the promise that follows every Wendell job, in Orlando and everywhere else the brand operates. You always know who is coming, when they’ll be there, and what it will cost.
Our Credentials
- State-licensed. Every pro working under our name is required to hold the license and insurance their state requires. That’s a requirement of working with Wendell, not a perk.
- Insured. We carry coverage on every job so your home and our crew are protected while work is underway.
- Experienced. Blake has spent more than a decade in restoration and residential construction. That means he’s seen what water, fire, and mold actually do in Florida homes, not just what the textbook says.
- Backed by The Relay Visibility Guarantee. This is the warranty that follows every Wendell job. It’s how we hold ourselves accountable.
Why does this matter when you’re deciding who to let into your home? Because restoration work happens during some of the worst days of your life. You’re not in a position to verify credentials after the fact. You need to know before the door opens that the person on the other side is qualified, insured, and answerable to a standard bigger than their own word. That’s what these credentials mean, and that’s why we put them here in plain writing.
Rooted in Orlando
We serve the whole Orlando metro: Orlovista, Maitland, Altamonte Springs, Ocoee, Four Corners, Wekiwa Springs, Horizon West, Longwood, Azalea Park, and Doctor Phillips. Each neighborhood has its own character, its own housing stock, and its own failure patterns. A lakefront home in Winter Park gets water differently than a newer build in Horizon West. We know both, because we work in both. Wendell is a friendly, old-fashioned first name. It reads like a company that actually answers. We like that, because it’s true.
Written by Blake Sorensen, Owner at Wendell Restoration Orlando, serving Orlando since 2006.